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Bhaskar Sunkara

lines on the record: 237
first: 2022-12-22
most recent: 2022-12-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“But I'll take the three points. It's part of, I just want to march down the field. I want to get within scoring position. The reason why we should really move from this analogy, but the reason why I call myself a socialist is looking through history and these examples of social democracy, you saw that they were able to give working class people lots of rights and income and power in their society. But at the end of the day, capitalists still had the ultimate power, which is the ability to withhold investment. So they could say in the late 1960s and the early 70s, listen, I was fine with this arrangement ten years ago. But now I feel like I'm going to take my money and I'm going to go move to a different country or I'm just going to not invest because my workers are paid too much. I'm still making money, but I feel like I could be making more.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think you need to limit the scope of where the state is and what the state can do and how the state functions, first of all. Now, for me, social democracy was like the equivalent of I'll give a football analogy. It was the equivalent of getting to the red zone and then kicking a field goal. You'll take the three points, but you would have rather got a touchdown. And for me, socialism would be the touchdown. It's not a separate different playing field.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think did great things with the New Deal. In Russia, of course, this language was used to trample upon individual rights and to justify hardship and abuses of ordinary individual people in the name of a collective destiny. A destiny, of course, it was just decided by the party in power and during the 30s and 40s by just Dalin himself, really. Think that that's really the case for. Making sure that we have a bedrock of civil rights and democracy. And then on top of that, we could debate. We could debate different National destinies. We could debate different appeals, different visions of the world. But as long as people have a say in what sacrifices they're being asked to do, and as long as those sacrifices don't take away what's fundamentally ours, which is our life, which is our basic rights.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I might surprise you with my answer because I would say yes, maybe. But I think that it's not just socialism. Any sort of ideology that appeals to the collective and appeals to our long-term destiny, either as a species or as a nation or as a class or whatever else, can lend itself to authoritarianism. So you can see this in many of the nationalisms of the 20th century. Now some of these nationalisms used incredibly lofty collective rhetoric like in Sweden the rhetoric of we're going to create the people's home. We're going to make this a country with dignity for all Swedes. We're going to make this a country that's more developed, more free, and so on. In countries like Germany and Italy and horrendous things with that. In the US with national popular appeals.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What he was doing in the context of the Russian nation and development, but also all the threats that came from abroad through, you know, the civil war wasn't just a civil war. It was really an invasion by many imperial powers all around the world as well. So I think a lot of it was conditions and circumstance. And I guess the question really is to what role ideology played? Is there something within the socialist tradition that might have lended itself to authoritarianism? And that's something we should talk about.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Later on, as economies got more complex, as they kind of moved beyond regular heavy industry and as the main stable of the economy, the Russian economy and its command system was unable to adapt and cope and ended up falling back behind the West again by the 1970s. So all this is a very long story to say that a lot went wrong in Russia. The economic picture is actually a little bit more complicated. Politically, I think it's just a small party without much popular support, but with real popular support in a couple cities, but without a lot of popular support empire-wide took power and they felt like they couldn't give back power. And they kept holding on to power. And eventually among their ranks in these conditions, one of history's great tyrants took power and was able to justify.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Developmental trajectory. So by the time the post war period came, one it might have gave them the ability to survive the Nazi invasion to begin with. That's a complicated question. And then by the time the post-war period came, Russia had kind of jumped ahead of its developmental trajectory in a way that a lot of other countries didn't do. There are a few examples, like Japan has won. They managed to, if you kind of ran a scenario where Japan would be in the 1870s, 1880s, and ran it 100 times, the Japan and the post-war period is kind of one of the best outcomes, right? And I think that you could say that about Russian economic development, its ability to catch up at a certain level to the West. And then after that, of course”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Plus, more ambitious attempts to build heavy industry through five year plans. Now, I say this kind of coolly, but we know in practice what that meant. You know, forced collectivization was a disaster. I mean, first of all, I think it was built on the faulty premise that scale always equals more productivity, when in fact, especially in agriculture, but in any field, it's a little bit more complicated than that. And it led to millions of deaths. You know, it led to famine. It led to a host of other problems. Industrialization in the way that it happened under Stalin also kind of unbalanced the Soviet economy to lean too heavy towards heavy industry. Not enough or medium or light industry. This did mean, especially the five year plan industrialization did manage to put Russia on a different”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then Stalin came into power, and he wanted to rapidly industrialize. And his logic was the revolution's not going to come in the West. We need to build socialism in one country, and we need to catch up with the West. We need to turn ourselves into industrial powerhouse as quickly as possible. And that's where you got force collectivization to try to increase the productivity of Russian agriculture through state ownership of a previously fragmented agricultural holdings. and through the implementation of mechanization to bring in more machines to make agriculture more productive, all under state ownership.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For a while, it seemed to be working. The revolution never came, that they were expecting in Western Europe. But in Russia itself, they were able to re-stabilize things by the middle or end of the 1920s, and they were able to build more of a popular base for some of their policies because people who had seen the chaos of World War I and revolution and then civil war kind of just wanted stability. And after a decade plus of war, if you had a government that was able to give you enough to eat and a job, that was good enough for them.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The alternative in their minds was going to be a far right reaction, you know, some sort of general taking power in a coup or whatever else, or just them ending up back in prison, because a lot of them were in prison under the Tsar, or just killed. So they figured, all right, we're going to have a holding action where we maintain as much of this territory of the old Russian Empire as possible. We'll try to slowly implement changes, re-stabilize the economy through something called a new economic program, which was kind of a form of social democracy, if you will, because it allowed market exchange for the peasants combined with state ownership of industries in the cities.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say that the Soviet experiment started off by in Lenin's time as the attempt to kind of just a holding action. Hey, we don't really have the conditions to rule this country. We have the support of the working class, or most of it, for the working class is only 3% of the population. The peasantry is really against us. A lot of this 3% of the population has died in war and half of them supported the Mensheviks and the more moderate socialists anyway.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me start with the second part of that question, and that's a very difficult one to answer in part because I morally and ethically am opposed to any form of authoritarianism or dictatorship. And often when you talk about the successes of a government or what it did developmentally that might have been positive, we have to abstract ourselves from what we morally believe and just kind of look at the record, right?”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ideology of these communists, but in part because of the conditions in which they inherited. You know, they were inheriting a democracy. They were inheriting a country that had been ruled by the Tsars for centuries and with very little condition, like a very weak working class, very poor and devastated by war and so on, where authoritarianism kind of lended itself to those conditions. Then there's me. Then there's Democratic socialists. And the way I would define it is We like a lot of what the Social Democrats accomplished, but we still believe in going beyond capitalism and not just building socialism within capitalism, but we believe in this ultimate vision of a world after capitalism.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's where official kind of communism out of Russia emerged. In other parts of Europe, parties were actually able to take power. Some in the interwar period, but most in the post-war period. And they also came out of this old social democratic movement. And these parties mostly just call themselves socialists. And a lot of them still on paper wanted to go beyond capitalism, but in practice, they just managed capitalism better in the interest of workers. But they all had the same common ancestor. And in practice, to me, social democracy means trying to insert doses of socialism within capitalism, but maintaining capitalism. Communism met this attempt to build a socialism outside of capitalism and often authoritarian ways, in part because of”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was the Bolshevik faction of the Russian movement, Lenin's Bolshevik Party, that took power in Russia after a period of turmoil where it didn't seem what was it going to go to the fascist right or was it going to go to the far left? There was a period of flux and turmoil in Russia, but definitely the old regime was not able to stand. And these Russian social democrats, these Bolsheviks said social democracy has so betrayed the idea of internationalism and brotherhood and progress of it was supposed to stand for that we can't call ourselves social democrats anymore. We're going to go back to this old term that Marx used. We're going to call ourselves communists.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Movements took root across the capitalist world, but including in Russia and in conditions of illegality. So it was assumed for many, many years in the workers' movement across Europe and among socialists of Europe, they called themselves social democrats then, that the revolution would first probably happen in Germany and this develop, growing hub of industrial capitalism and not in semi-feudal Russia. But then World War I came, the workers' movement was split between parties that decided to either keep their head down or to implicitly support the war and support the war for now or keep your heads down. Don't get banned. Don't get arrested. Then we'll just take power after the war is over. And those like Russia and also in the United States for that matter that chose the path of resistance to the war.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, I hate the no true Scotsman sort of response to this, which is, oh, that socialism is bad So it wasn't really socialism. And my socialism is good, so it is socialism. But I think that socialism and communism share a common ancestor, which is they both emerged out of the turmoil and development of late 19th century capitalism. And the fact that there was all these workers' parties that were organizing across the capitalist world. So in Europe, for instance, you had this mass party called the German Social Democratic Party in the became probably the most important, the most vibrant party in Germany in the 1880s and 1890s, but they were locked out of power because Germany at the time was still mostly Atarkic. It had a parliamentary democracy, but it was a very undemocratic democracy. The Kaiser still ruled.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, if you're a poor city and a rich city in Connecticut is great. It's highly, highly underrated. Both New Yorkers and people from Boston kind of have a colonial feeling about Connecticut, where we make fun of it and we try to carve it up. The West belongs to New York, the East to Boston. But I'm here for Connecticut nationalism. I think it's a great place.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think innately human, innately striving that a lot of people have, but we don't really give people in our current society the tools to really be full participants in our society. We just take for granted, for example, I'm from the Northeast, so I give excessively northeast examples. We take for granted that someone from Hartford, Connecticut is going to have your average working class person in Hartford's going to have a very different life outcome than someone born on the same day, the same hour in in Greenwich, Connecticut. You know, we take for granted that accidents of birth are going to dictate outcomes.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're recording this on growers and workers in agriculture in the US. So I think that one working class people are already working. But as far as getting out from under poverty and desperation, we're in a society that doesn't give people a lot of tools. So if you don't have access to good public schools from age five until 12, 13, it's going to be really hard to move from generations of your family being involved in manual labor to doing other forms of labor. You're going to be stuck at a certain part of our labor market as a result. If you don't have access to decent healthcare throughout your life, you might be already preordained to an early grave by life. The time”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a lot of people who are stuck at the bottom of the labor market today, one, these are people who are kind of our true philanthropists because a lot of them are the ones who are working two jobs and are working 60 plus hours and are providing in this country it's such a bargain for their labor because they're so underpaid. So many of the things that the rest of us use to enjoy life and consumption or whatever else. I got here from downtown Austin and I think my lift I did tip, but I think my lift was like eight bucks base or whatever else. It's the, I think that we are all indebted to people who are working and we don't see at various stages of the production process from the workers in China and Taiwan producing technological things that”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of staying in more money for consumption, more ability to do cool things, more just social rewards. It comes from being successful or from providing would be enough. But that's another thing that would have to be balanced in a system. So if you're seeing mass unemployment by choice in a democratic socialist system, then you might need to reconfigure the incentives. You might need to encourage people to go back into production. But that's something that, again, you could do through democracy and through good governance. You don't have to set the perfect blueprint in motion. Write up a treatise now in 50 years from now, try to follow like it's scripture.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bologna watching TV or something, you know, because you get that random conversation, that sense of a place and belonging. But I guess what's the undercurrent maybe of your question was, now if you have a system with lots of carrots but not the whip of, hey, you might be destitute, you might be unemployed, you might not be able to support yourself unless you're working a certain amount. Would we still be as productive? Would we still be able to generate enough value for society? And I think that that's a question that is quite interesting. I think that we're living in a society now with enough abundance that we could afford more people deciding to opt out of the system, out of production, and that the carrots.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Leisure should mean civic activity too, right? I mean, there's that famous book The Robert Putnam One Bowling Alone or whatever, which described that for now. I mean, it was born in 1989. I like, you know, video and computer games, you know. So I definitely do that type of leisure too, but I found a lot more richness in my life in the last decade a lot of my leisure has returned to like going to the local bar for the couple drinks I have a week instead of doing it at home.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a necessity for systems to grow and evolve to have that freedom in civil society. But as for individuals. First part of it is, yeah, I think people should be free to make their own choices. You might have tremendous potential, but you might choose to spend it in leisure. And leisure doesn't only mean doing, you know, sitting around at home, drinking a bunch of beers, kind of wasting your life away that way. Leisure might mean spending more time with your friends and family, building these sort of relationships that are going to maybe not change the world in some meta sense, but will change the lives of the people around you and will change your community for the better.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People are louding Chinese authoritarianism. And they're saying China is building this efficient system, this state runs so well, there's technocratic excellence. Plus there's just productivity and they're just working harder than Americans and whatever else. But look at in practice what really happened with COVID. Both the initial suppressing of information about what was happening in Wuhan and the outbreak where many ordinary Chinese workers and doctors and others were trying to get the word out and they were suppressed by Communist Party officials locally in Wuhan probably with the collusion naturally. And now with zero COVID policies and whatever else. So I think that often we find that even though it seems like these are weak systems and democracy makes us less competent technocratically and otherwise, I think it's”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, for one thing, people are going to take advantage of systems, they're going to find loopholes, they're going to find ways around, they're going to find ways to at times dominate and chorus others, even in systems meant to get rid of domination and coercion. That's why we need to design our systems in such a way that it eliminates as many of these things as possible. And also that's why we need democracy. We need freedom. So in a Soviet system, for instance, you had the rise of this authoritarian bureaucracy that dominated, of course, others in the name of socialism. Now, that system desperately could have used some political democracy and some checks.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Prioritizing the freedom of one group or one class or whatever else compared to another that you end up in some sort of tyranny. Now, if the states that ULEX, you're a capitalist, so you don't get the right to vote, or we're going to take away your private home or your ability to do things we think are intrinsic human rights. Now, this would be tyranny. This would be an abridgment of your rights, but shaping your ability in the economic sphere to be an economic actor is, I think, within the realm and scope of democratic politics.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, that, of course, is now an entrepreneur, your freedom to set certain terms of employment, to engage in a contract with free people. But now your workers and other workers in the sector, because if you did it unilaterally, you just get undercut by your competition. Now, these people now have a few extra hours a week. They can do whatever they want with. They could watch more NFL with it. They could spend more time with their friends or family or whatever else. And they're still getting paid the same, if not better, because the wages also went up. So it's really a question often of trade-offs between whose freedom and autonomy are you going to prioritize the freedom and autonomy of the entrepreneur or the capitalist in this case or the freedom and autonomy of ordinary workers. Now you could create a society that swings so far in the direction of”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“40 hours of work per week. Now, if the government comes along and says, okay, there's now a new minimum wage, the minimum wage is $22 an hour, and also there's a maximum work week, 35 hour work week. And if you work someone over 35 hours, even if they agree, you have to pay them time and a half.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's them trying to just accurately describe what socialism is trying to do. The way that I would put it is a little bit different. Socialists are proposing a trade-off, but it's really a trade-off between freedom and freedom. And by that I mean, let's say you set up a successful business and you set up a business right here in Austin, Texas, some sort of firm, it's producing some widget or whatever and it's producing a good that people really want and demand, but you have some competition, you decide to hire 20, 30 people to help you. You entered into a free contract with these people who under capitalism, of course, were not living in feudalism, have the option to join any other firm, but they like you and they like this firm and they like your offer and you're paying them, let's say, $20 an hour for.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's wealth and resources, yes, but it's also power. And I guess one way to think about this is. Some thinkers on the right, like Hayek, they would say in their most generous moments talking about socialists and socialism, they would say socialists want to trade some of your freedom for equality.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you could do both. There's always a balance between the two. I think you could reward people who make innovations and who improve lives for everyone through their innovations by giving them, let's say, even more consumption, even that level of inequality while still making sure that there's not people in poverty and suffering and while making sure that, hey, we're going to give these people who want to work that extra 10 hours or 20 hours or want to apply their hard work, some extra benefits, but that these benefits would be not the extreme disparities that you have today.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My own grandmother was born in Trinidad and Tobago. She was illiterate. Till her dying days, in East Orange, New Jersey, she never had the chance to write down her memories of her life in Trinidad as a young woman and what it meant. She, of course, had lots of children and she was able to impart some stories to her children and grandchildren. But I often think about what someone with her wit and intelligence could have done with a little bit more support.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think at the core, it's the idea that we have intrinsic value. We are individuals that have unequal talents, of course. We're individuals that want different things. But this unique individualness can only truly come to light in a society in which there are certain collective or social guarantees. So we could think just like Stephen Jay Gould, the scientist and socialist used to say about how many thousands of potential Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci's that died in sweatshops. and on plantations and never got the chance to cultivate what was unique in human about themselves and also never got a chance to have families and impart what was special and important to them to future generations and to posterity.”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's so many socialists out there, and we can't seem to agree about anything. So, my definition, I'm sure, is really just my definition. But I think at the minimum, socialism is about making sure that the core necessities of life, food, housing, education, and so on, are guaranteed to everyone just by virtue of being born so that those people can reach their potential. And I think that's a minimum requirement of socialism. Beyond that, I think socialism, especially democratic socialism, the type of socialism that I believe in, is about taking democracy from just the political democratic realm and extending it into economic and social spheres as well. So if we think that democracy is a good thing, why do we allow our workplaces to be run in autocratic ways?”
2022-12-22 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #349 – Bhaskar Sunkara: The Case for Socialism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source